Down we plunge into a familiar rabbit hole: Does the performance of a university's sports teams have any significant bearing on the overall quality of the school?

The bottom-line answer is blazingly simple -- of course not.

Oh, we've heard all the arguments about how winning on the field or on the court generates good publicity and good vibes, makes a school more appealing to potential students, loosens up alumni contributors. What's not to like about beating an old rival, or claiming a conference championship or even a national crown? North Carolinians know the thrill.

We can go even further and extol the pleasures of golden Saturday afternoons in the football stadium, the excitement, the cheers, the glorious sound of the bands ...

Yet it's all just entertainment, of which there's no shortage in this world for those with the time and/or money to indulge. For the sports-addicted, you could try picking a pro team to root for -- the Canes look like they know how to stay in the mix, even if the Panthers have had a memory lapse. (Don't bring up the Redskins. Sore subject.)

That reminds us -- where would pro football and basketball be without the colleges to groom prospective players? Which just goes to illustrate the conflicted position so many colleges and universities have gotten into, operating as training academies for the professional leagues.

Of course, only a few of their players actually make the leap into the pros. The others may or may not graduate with a worthwhile education, having been students to the extent their jam-packed conditioning and practice and game schedules permitted.

It's true that some schools occasionally appear to enjoy the best of both worlds -- good academic reputations and athletic success at the highest level. What compromises they have to make, perhaps we don't want to know. We have seen confirmation of late that schools hoping to be nationally competitive in football or basketball have driven the market price of a head coach into the range of $2 million a year. If that's not out of hand, it's hard to tell what would be. And what coach worth that kind of money is eager to work in facilities less than palatial?

OK, maybe the more sophisticated take on all this is just to view it as a variant of that worldly-wise maxim, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." Winning teams are like home-baked apple pies for prospective students and donors, so just go ahead and get with the program.

Also, we're a competitive species, and when that competitive urge finds an outlet in sports, with all the benefits of exercise and teamwork for the participants, that's healthy and fun. The problems arise when in the lust for glory costs soar, creating a need for television revenue, creating a need for wins, creating a need for corner-cutting in recruiting and academics ... it goes on and on in a cycle that risks subordinating the values of the university to the values of an athletics colossus answerable, essentially, to no one except itself.

What are the values worth upholding? Among many, we could single out respect for the individual, so that a college refrains from enlisting a corps of gladiators in hopes of benefitting from their efforts.

The standards by which we typically rate our colleges and universities are conventional: SAT scores of students, selectivity, number of faculty, financial resources and so forth. Athletic prowess crops up here and there among the top schools, but it's the irrelevant exception rather than the rule.

Change the metrics as they've done at The Washington Monthly magazine, and you come up with a different perspective on excellence in higher education. There's no weight given to selectivity in admissions, so it makes no difference how many applications are generated by a winning basketball team.

The magazine, picking up where U.S. News & World Report leaves off, ranks schools using three broad categories: 1) how well they promote social mobility (specifically, how successful they are in graduating lower-income students), 2) how they perform as research institutions, attracting grants and producing Ph.D.'s, and 3) their commitment to national service, as measured by participation in ROTC and the Peace Corps, and by the share of federal work-study funds spent on service-related jobs.

The top-ranked national university turns out to be Texas A&M, with UCLA, UC-Berkeley and UC-San Diego in the next three spots. UNC-Chapel Hill ranks 20th, Harvard 27th, Duke 29th, N.C. State 106th and Wake Forest 122nd, out of 242 such schools. So "Go Aggies!" They would have earned it, even if their football team hadn't beaten favored Texas to enhance our Thanksgiving Friday menu of amusements.